The problem is that people aren't totally qualified to know what's worth paying for and what's not.
There are many kinds of independent professionals available for hire in the marketplace and from whom people seek all manner of advice. Need a second opinion on that contract or legal matter? You hire a lawyer. Want to buy a home or sell the one you have? You hire a realtor. Are you sick or need medical advice? You hire a doctor. A visit to the doctor's office or clinic to receive consultation, diagnosis or even minor treatment wouldn't cost more than $300 or so and probably less than that in most cases if people paid out of their own pocket instead paying via third party insurance. The point is that the marketplace has a solution to the problem of imperfect information and lack of personal expertise and it's the hired professional who offers his services for a fee. It works in all other areas of the economy and it could work in health care too if not for the ass backwards laws, rules and regulations that enable and perpetuate the current mess.
The best they can't do is find out who offers a particular service for cheaper, but that won't tell them whether or not they really need that cat scan to find the problem or whether an alternative method would be just as effective.
Hence the need for professional advice (see above).
A free market only works when the consumer is able to make rational, informed decisions.
It works and works well every day, even in the absence of perfect rationality. In fact whenever we attempt to substitute centralized government control, however rational and well planned, for the natural operation of the marketplace we invariably see more expensive, less efficient and lower quality outcomes than we would have had the market, though individual decisions made according to personal preferences, been allowed to discover the correct balance of inputs and outputs through the iterated feedback of continuous independent transactions made by interested and willing individual participants.
People with no medical training and who are in a vulnerable, time-pressed position due to illness will never rise to that standard.
So what? We abdicate personal responsibility merely because some minority of the population cannot or will not make adult decisions? Most medical needs are not so time-pressed or life and limb threatening that personal reflection and rational thought are impossible. If people want to be treated as independent adults then we have to expect some reasonable level of personal responsibility and that includes responsibility for individual health and well being. There will always be special cases, especially for real emergencies, but these are the exceptions and should not become the norm.
So quit having the government guarantee her loan to the lenders and you will see how quickly those loan offers dry up. When colleges and lenders no longer have such easy access to the public purse, maybe they'll have to start offering just what students need and not necessarily everything they want. Do you really think that your freshman classes at Harvard are better than the 40 dollar per unit courses at the local community college? Don't bet on it. Undergraduates frequently overpay for what they're getting education wise here in the United States. Some colleges are worth paying for in some majors, but most of them are just charging more for the brand name product when the generic store brand is just as good.
and mark that he's an idiot and you don't want to let him borrow money ever.
Did you know that the most profitable borrowers are the ones who have recently been through bankruptcy? And I'm not just talking about those people who are seven years out of it either, but those who are a year or even just six months out of it. Don't believe me? Just ask anyone who works in the credit industry. These people will pay more interest and fees, per dollar borrowed, on a credit card with a $500 dollar limit than any platinum card holder with a 100k limit ever will.
You are aware that a $50K earner in the US is paying an average tax rate of -2% for the common good? That is, they GET more from government that they pay.
By whose reckoning? I've never taken food stamps or state assistance, and I didn't qualify for the need based scholarship for in state college tuition. I pay plenty of gas taxes for the roads I use and a hefty income tax to boot. How is it that I'm getting more than I pay? Every time I turn around the government is handing me a bill. Am I to believe that criminals would be running rampant through the streets, looting and burning as they go, if not for my taxes? Even if that's true, I still feel like I'm not getting very good value for the money.
Tax time means money back.
Not for me it doesn't. I haven't had a refund since my college days.
Yes, they about 15% for SS and Medicare, but they get all of that back in retirement.
So they say, but the people promising that to me now will all be long dead by the time I'm old enough to collect. Do you think they'll still care that they screwed me while they were living? Unless you believe in karma and reincarnation, that's a tough sell.
In fact, everything they pay in medicare comes back at about 3X what they pay in. SS delivers an annual return rate of about 2%.
Big whoop. I could easily triple my money over 40+ years of investing with a much better than 2% average rate of return. I don't need the government to "help" me earn such a lousy return, but they keep insisting that we Americans are too stupid to save for our own retirements. Personally, I'm not counting on Social Security to be there for me when I retire and neither is any other young American with an ounce of good sense, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy throwing my FICA withholding down the drain each month in the meantime.
The situation is exactly flipped in Europe. The middle class and the working poor pay huge taxes.
The middle class here in the US isn't fairing much better. It's still heavily taxed and shrinking year by year.
No one chooses the "cheapest" over the "best" unless they are simply priced out of the best
That presumes that the cheapest is never the best or that the most expensive always is, neither of which is necessarily true even in healthcare. The free market could work in health care just as it does in other areas, but that won't happen until people are paying their own bill out of their own pocket and making their own decisions about what's worth paying for and what's not. In healthcare as in every other part of life, people always spend their own money more wisely and carefully when they spend it on themselves and are forced to live with and learn from the consequences of those decisions, both good and bad. The government will still have a regulatory role to play, but right now were going backwards by involving the government even more and the market even less with Obamacare so it may be a generation or two now before Americans finally come around to the right answer with healthcare.
Figure out a way so that football and basketball have a large minor league system
Would you pay to go to minor league football or basketball games? Would you watch them on television? Would you buy their swag? If you answered "NO" to these questions then you know why there aren't minor league football or basketball teams.
You left out the part where not everybody gets to go to college on the government's dime. In Europe there are a limited number of free spots and they're awarded based on strict academic merit. You have to compete to win a place and the competition is fierce. If you don't place high enough in school levels and exams then it's no free college for you. In fact, it's not so uncommon to so the sons and daughters of wealthy Europeans who didn't make the cut at home attending university here in the United States instead.
I salute you sir. It's a shame that more young Americans aren't like you, but they're too comfy, soft and arrogant to admit that they're lucky to have what they've already got. So they whine and complain instead about how college is too expensive and how they cannot afford it while typing up their papers on a $4000 dollar Macbook , updating their Facebook status on their latest generation iPhone and ordering another round of sushi at the swanky fusion restaurant downtown while planning their year abroad in Europe and damn it they're entitled to these things because President Obama promised them that they too could go to college!
Please tell me how you managed to make $30k/year working part time?
My aunt made $45,000 her first month by using a little known stock market secret or by flipping houses according to some magic formula and those secrets could be yours today for the low, low price of $30,000. What could possibly go wrong? Order now!:D
Meanwhile, unless I'm mistaken, kids in Europe go to college for free.
Yes, but I think you may have misunderstood what that means. In Europe some kids go to university for free, but that's a privilege that's earned through academic achievement. It's not a right. Europeans only invest in those students who, through hard work and superior test scores, have proven that they're worthy of that investment. That's a far cry from Obama and his "everyone is entitled to go to college" bullshit.
Some universities have exercise areas that are reminiscent of spas and exclusive health resorts than a university.
Why do you suppose they do that? The answer is simple. They're playing to the wants of incoming freshman rather than their needs because they know that if they can make the mega sized fitness center and spa facility look like something out of a Caribbean resort vacation that those visiting prospective students and their parents will fall for the pitch. Undergraduates and their tuition pay the bills. If the University has to charge tuition plus fee for luxury health spa to compete for incoming freshmen, then that's exactly what they will do. The students take out loans on the public dime to finance their resort vacation (aka education) and then whine to the rest of us that their student loans are too much to pay back to which I can only say boo fucking hoo. Why should I as a taxpayer be forced to loan money to somebody so that they can take a four year resort vacation on my dime and study for some bullshit psychology degree with a minor in binge drinking? That's what any private lender would call a bad credit risk and they'd be right. If you were investing your own money with an expectation of return would you loan to somebody like that? I think not.
It is amazing that our parents and grandparents were able to do things like send men to the moon without plush padded seating and nicely carpeted hallways at their universities. Even so, they could still afford to get an education.
Our parents and grandparents knew a thing or two about working hard and delayed gratification, not to mention that they've been around the block a few times. Young people today could learn a thing or two from them if they weren't so damned arrogant and took their eyes and ears away from their smartphones long enough to listen instead of lapping up the bullshit that's being spoon fed to them by the politicians. Hindsight is 20/20, but very often it's too late. When they finally figure out what Obama has done to their futures 10 or 15 years from now, they will wish that they hadn't traded a few percentage points off that student loan for a part time career at Starbucks.
And in today's day and age of greedy corporations, why would someone say no to easy money? The only thing I can think up is that they really are stupid people in charge of their companies.
Obviously they make more money (for now) by keeping the existing deals going. The side effect is that cable and satellite rates to consumers have now reached insane levels as the content producers demand ever more money from the cable companies for exclusive carriage. However, all hope is not yet lost and the cracks are beginning to show in the old guard system. For example, the spat between CBS and Time Warner Cable was yet another skirmish in the run up to a major war for content between the upstarts, lead by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu and the old guard content delivery players in the cable and satellite businesses. Eventually the price of exclusivity will get too high and consumers will be forced to cancel because they simply cannot afford rates that high and that will mark the beginning of the content war that has been a long time in coming but has not yet arrived in full force. I think that the question will be settled within the next 10 years with most content moving to Internet streaming on demand and cable or satellite relegated to live events and pay per view sports with break even rates on everything else as they compete with Amazon, Netflix and Hulu (assuming that they survive as an independent player). The main casualty will be the current system of bundling cable channels and content and the all or nothing take it or leave it style cable and satellite packages. Those days are numbered now for sure. The cable and satellite companies should be especially concerned with Jeff Bezos and Amazon because Mr. Bezos is no fool and Amazon has given every indication that they intend to become a very serious competitor in this space. They aren't there yet, but the cable and satellite companies ignore Amazon at their peril, especially in the medium to long run.
Part of the job of any CEO is to publicly promote the company and make bold statements not just in support of the company and its products but also against the competition and their products. He's just doing his job.
So companies provide employees with a free benefit, thereby reducing pollution, and relieving traffic congestion, and this means that things are "getting worse"?
It makes sense once you consider the politics of the city and the people who live there. For example, it's obvious to most of us here that in a free society with a market economy the labor of some will be worth more than the labor of others and that over time this will invariably manifest itself in public displays of wealth inequality. However, in San Francisco it offends their delicate socialist sensibilities that something akin to mass transit is being offered privately to a privileged few and in a much finer manner than what is generally available to the public. Indeed, it's all the more galling to them that it's buses and not luxury cars because it invites an unfavorable comparison with the public mass transit system where, despite decades of effort, they have not been able to achieve nearly the same level of quality, reliability or luxury. In short, they're jealous of others' earned success and work themselves into a tizzy at what they view as a bourgeois privilege intruding upon what was formerly, at least in their eyes, a public and egalitarian method of transportation.
Another factor in all of this is the general lack of interest in the open source community when it comes to nuts and bolts accounting software. There are several reasons for this in my estimation. First, many developers work on this kind of software in their day jobs and the prospect of spending what little hobby time remains on bean counting software just isn't very exciting. Second, the small and medium sized business market for this type of software is already well served with off the shelf retail products and the types of organizations that aren't, including government and large businesses, have too much bureaucratic baggage and bullshit to make the project enjoyable. Finally, the types of people that one encounters in the open source movement aren't typically money people. If they were, then they would have gone to work for Wall Street instead.
It's funny how we claim in western culture that we should be free to do as we please as long as it's not hurting anyone else, but there are so many that feel the need to jump in and stop others from go on what could be the greatest adventure any of us could ever go on
It's a disease of the mind that we call Liberalism. Common symptoms include an insatiable desire to meddle in the affairs of others and irresistible urges to insert themselves into situations where they're neither invited nor welcome instead of minding their own business. The end result is a dependent and needy adult who cannot make their own way in the world without government assistance and with absolutely no clue about how the economy works or why nobody wants to pay them a "living wage" as a reward for their "enlightened" way of thinking.
The financial crisis of 2007-08 would have occurred even if the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act had never passed. The great houses of finance would have existed anyway, regardless of whether or not they were able to take on insured depositors, and they would have been just as big as they were. In fact, anyone who believes that the likes of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase wouldn't have been able to raise the capital necessary to inflate the derivatives bubble that blew up in 07 or that AIG wouldn't have taken on counter party risk by selling credit default swaps if only Glass-Steagall had been in full effect is either ignorant, naïve or pushing an agenda to people who are.
It was my understanding that polynomial time reducibility among NP complete problems had been proven, although I don't have a reference handy. However, reducibility is not the same thing as solving and just because conversion is theoretically possible doesn't mean that conversion algorithms for every pair of NP complete problems are automatically known and even if they are known, converting from one to another hasn't actually made solving either of them any easier since they both remain NP complete. You've obviously heard of the P = NP problem so you must also know that if even one NP complete problem could be solved with a polynomial time algorithm then all NP complete problems would also be solvable in polynomial time because they could first be converted to the formerly NP complete problem and then solved using the polynomial time algorithm. If such an algorithm could be demonstrated then the proof of P = NP would follow. Of course, no such algorithm has ever been demonstrated by anyone, probably because P almost certainly doesn't equal NP. Unfortunately, proving P != NP, which is almost certainly the case, is much harder because there is no provable limit to the number of problems that might ultimately be in NP so proof by exhaustion is out. That means that any proof of P != NP must rely upon pure math which has thus far proven to be non-trivial, as computer scientists are fond of saying.
Ugh that risotto with grubs did not help either... yuuuuucckkkkk! Bleah! Ugh!
And yet there is at least one group of native people living in the forests of Indonesia, The Koroway, who regularly eat Capricorn beetle grubs taken from rotten Sago tree logs.
Steve was right. The problems in our public schools are not caused by technology or lack thereof and cannot therefore be solved by technology. They are primarily political and economic in nature and must be addressed through reform of both how we organize and how we pay for our schools. Of course, the reforms that would be most effective in improving student outcomes and lowering costs are vehemently opposed by the teachers unions and their allies in the Democratic Party which is a shame because the students who pay the heaviest price for this failure are the very students whom the Democrats and their liberal progressive allies would most like to help, economically disadvantaged children of minority parents attending inner city schools. For example, do you suppose that those few parents in DC that were lucky enough to win vouchers for their children to attend elite private schools, like the one where Obama sends his own children, thanked the President for ending that program and throwing their children back into the worst public school system in the nation, they very one that they had tried so hard to escape, just so that he could appease the public school teachers and their union by doling out political patronage? Parents want vouchers and charter schools because that's what actually works, not more empty promises from the teachers unions and so-called education "activists" linked to the plantation that is the Democratic party.
The United States of America is the shining example of totalitarianism in the world today.
As compared to Russia or Venezuela or Iran or any of the other countries were people are truly oppressed? The left in the United States loves to compare their petty inconveniences to the real suffering that goes on in the rest of the world with wildly hyperbolic language, but in so doing they merely demonstrate their foolishness for all to see. The United States has many problems, but totalitarianism isn't one of them.
If young people don't pick up the fight that is literally their loss.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - Ronald Reagan.
The targets alone prove that this was the work of the Chinese because there's no money to be made in attacking either of these groups. The criminals are in it for the money and they wouldn't waste zero days on military groups in the Philippines or some offshoot of the Falun group of religious people. Furthermore, everybody knows that the Chinese government employs hackers, it's now documented public information, so there's no obvious political value in staging a false flag operation to make it look like it was the Chinese because that cat's already out of the bag. The only government on the entire planet that would perceive any value in attacking either of these groups is the Chinese government.
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The problem is that people aren't totally qualified to know what's worth paying for and what's not.
There are many kinds of independent professionals available for hire in the marketplace and from whom people seek all manner of advice. Need a second opinion on that contract or legal matter? You hire a lawyer. Want to buy a home or sell the one you have? You hire a realtor. Are you sick or need medical advice? You hire a doctor. A visit to the doctor's office or clinic to receive consultation, diagnosis or even minor treatment wouldn't cost more than $300 or so and probably less than that in most cases if people paid out of their own pocket instead paying via third party insurance. The point is that the marketplace has a solution to the problem of imperfect information and lack of personal expertise and it's the hired professional who offers his services for a fee. It works in all other areas of the economy and it could work in health care too if not for the ass backwards laws, rules and regulations that enable and perpetuate the current mess.
The best they can't do is find out who offers a particular service for cheaper, but that won't tell them whether or not they really need that cat scan to find the problem or whether an alternative method would be just as effective.
Hence the need for professional advice (see above).
A free market only works when the consumer is able to make rational, informed decisions.
It works and works well every day, even in the absence of perfect rationality. In fact whenever we attempt to substitute centralized government control, however rational and well planned, for the natural operation of the marketplace we invariably see more expensive, less efficient and lower quality outcomes than we would have had the market, though individual decisions made according to personal preferences, been allowed to discover the correct balance of inputs and outputs through the iterated feedback of continuous independent transactions made by interested and willing individual participants.
People with no medical training and who are in a vulnerable, time-pressed position due to illness will never rise to that standard.
So what? We abdicate personal responsibility merely because some minority of the population cannot or will not make adult decisions? Most medical needs are not so time-pressed or life and limb threatening that personal reflection and rational thought are impossible. If people want to be treated as independent adults then we have to expect some reasonable level of personal responsibility and that includes responsibility for individual health and well being. There will always be special cases, especially for real emergencies, but these are the exceptions and should not become the norm.
If she's managed to make it to college at 16, her parents have to cosign any loans
There's got to be at least one dumb math joke in there somewhere. Perhaps if my mind wasn't on such a tangent right now I'd be able to think of one?
So quit having the government guarantee her loan to the lenders and you will see how quickly those loan offers dry up. When colleges and lenders no longer have such easy access to the public purse, maybe they'll have to start offering just what students need and not necessarily everything they want. Do you really think that your freshman classes at Harvard are better than the 40 dollar per unit courses at the local community college? Don't bet on it. Undergraduates frequently overpay for what they're getting education wise here in the United States. Some colleges are worth paying for in some majors, but most of them are just charging more for the brand name product when the generic store brand is just as good.
I don't see how someone can give informed consent to any kind of debt contract without understanding the exponential nature of compound interest.
I seem to recall that that concept was introduced in 7th grade algebra and certainly by 9th grade. Perhaps they weren't paying attention?
and mark that he's an idiot and you don't want to let him borrow money ever.
Did you know that the most profitable borrowers are the ones who have recently been through bankruptcy? And I'm not just talking about those people who are seven years out of it either, but those who are a year or even just six months out of it. Don't believe me? Just ask anyone who works in the credit industry. These people will pay more interest and fees, per dollar borrowed, on a credit card with a $500 dollar limit than any platinum card holder with a 100k limit ever will.
You are aware that a $50K earner in the US is paying an average tax rate of -2% for the common good? That is, they GET more from government that they pay.
By whose reckoning? I've never taken food stamps or state assistance, and I didn't qualify for the need based scholarship for in state college tuition. I pay plenty of gas taxes for the roads I use and a hefty income tax to boot. How is it that I'm getting more than I pay? Every time I turn around the government is handing me a bill. Am I to believe that criminals would be running rampant through the streets, looting and burning as they go, if not for my taxes? Even if that's true, I still feel like I'm not getting very good value for the money.
Tax time means money back.
Not for me it doesn't. I haven't had a refund since my college days.
Yes, they about 15% for SS and Medicare, but they get all of that back in retirement.
So they say, but the people promising that to me now will all be long dead by the time I'm old enough to collect. Do you think they'll still care that they screwed me while they were living? Unless you believe in karma and reincarnation, that's a tough sell.
In fact, everything they pay in medicare comes back at about 3X what they pay in. SS delivers an annual return rate of about 2%.
Big whoop. I could easily triple my money over 40+ years of investing with a much better than 2% average rate of return. I don't need the government to "help" me earn such a lousy return, but they keep insisting that we Americans are too stupid to save for our own retirements. Personally, I'm not counting on Social Security to be there for me when I retire and neither is any other young American with an ounce of good sense, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy throwing my FICA withholding down the drain each month in the meantime.
The situation is exactly flipped in Europe. The middle class and the working poor pay huge taxes.
The middle class here in the US isn't fairing much better. It's still heavily taxed and shrinking year by year.
No one chooses the "cheapest" over the "best" unless they are simply priced out of the best
That presumes that the cheapest is never the best or that the most expensive always is, neither of which is necessarily true even in healthcare. The free market could work in health care just as it does in other areas, but that won't happen until people are paying their own bill out of their own pocket and making their own decisions about what's worth paying for and what's not. In healthcare as in every other part of life, people always spend their own money more wisely and carefully when they spend it on themselves and are forced to live with and learn from the consequences of those decisions, both good and bad. The government will still have a regulatory role to play, but right now were going backwards by involving the government even more and the market even less with Obamacare so it may be a generation or two now before Americans finally come around to the right answer with healthcare.
Figure out a way so that football and basketball have a large minor league system
Would you pay to go to minor league football or basketball games? Would you watch them on television? Would you buy their swag? If you answered "NO" to these questions then you know why there aren't minor league football or basketball teams.
You left out the part where not everybody gets to go to college on the government's dime. In Europe there are a limited number of free spots and they're awarded based on strict academic merit. You have to compete to win a place and the competition is fierce. If you don't place high enough in school levels and exams then it's no free college for you. In fact, it's not so uncommon to so the sons and daughters of wealthy Europeans who didn't make the cut at home attending university here in the United States instead.
I salute you sir. It's a shame that more young Americans aren't like you, but they're too comfy, soft and arrogant to admit that they're lucky to have what they've already got. So they whine and complain instead about how college is too expensive and how they cannot afford it while typing up their papers on a $4000 dollar Macbook , updating their Facebook status on their latest generation iPhone and ordering another round of sushi at the swanky fusion restaurant downtown while planning their year abroad in Europe and damn it they're entitled to these things because President Obama promised them that they too could go to college!
Please tell me how you managed to make $30k/year working part time?
My aunt made $45,000 her first month by using a little known stock market secret or by flipping houses according to some magic formula and those secrets could be yours today for the low, low price of $30,000. What could possibly go wrong? Order now! :D
Meanwhile, unless I'm mistaken, kids in Europe go to college for free.
Yes, but I think you may have misunderstood what that means. In Europe some kids go to university for free, but that's a privilege that's earned through academic achievement. It's not a right. Europeans only invest in those students who, through hard work and superior test scores, have proven that they're worthy of that investment. That's a far cry from Obama and his "everyone is entitled to go to college" bullshit.
Some universities have exercise areas that are reminiscent of spas and exclusive health resorts than a university.
Why do you suppose they do that? The answer is simple. They're playing to the wants of incoming freshman rather than their needs because they know that if they can make the mega sized fitness center and spa facility look like something out of a Caribbean resort vacation that those visiting prospective students and their parents will fall for the pitch. Undergraduates and their tuition pay the bills. If the University has to charge tuition plus fee for luxury health spa to compete for incoming freshmen, then that's exactly what they will do. The students take out loans on the public dime to finance their resort vacation (aka education) and then whine to the rest of us that their student loans are too much to pay back to which I can only say boo fucking hoo. Why should I as a taxpayer be forced to loan money to somebody so that they can take a four year resort vacation on my dime and study for some bullshit psychology degree with a minor in binge drinking? That's what any private lender would call a bad credit risk and they'd be right. If you were investing your own money with an expectation of return would you loan to somebody like that? I think not.
It is amazing that our parents and grandparents were able to do things like send men to the moon without plush padded seating and nicely carpeted hallways at their universities. Even so, they could still afford to get an education.
Our parents and grandparents knew a thing or two about working hard and delayed gratification, not to mention that they've been around the block a few times. Young people today could learn a thing or two from them if they weren't so damned arrogant and took their eyes and ears away from their smartphones long enough to listen instead of lapping up the bullshit that's being spoon fed to them by the politicians. Hindsight is 20/20, but very often it's too late. When they finally figure out what Obama has done to their futures 10 or 15 years from now, they will wish that they hadn't traded a few percentage points off that student loan for a part time career at Starbucks.
And in today's day and age of greedy corporations, why would someone say no to easy money? The only thing I can think up is that they really are stupid people in charge of their companies.
Obviously they make more money (for now) by keeping the existing deals going. The side effect is that cable and satellite rates to consumers have now reached insane levels as the content producers demand ever more money from the cable companies for exclusive carriage. However, all hope is not yet lost and the cracks are beginning to show in the old guard system. For example, the spat between CBS and Time Warner Cable was yet another skirmish in the run up to a major war for content between the upstarts, lead by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu and the old guard content delivery players in the cable and satellite businesses. Eventually the price of exclusivity will get too high and consumers will be forced to cancel because they simply cannot afford rates that high and that will mark the beginning of the content war that has been a long time in coming but has not yet arrived in full force. I think that the question will be settled within the next 10 years with most content moving to Internet streaming on demand and cable or satellite relegated to live events and pay per view sports with break even rates on everything else as they compete with Amazon, Netflix and Hulu (assuming that they survive as an independent player). The main casualty will be the current system of bundling cable channels and content and the all or nothing take it or leave it style cable and satellite packages. Those days are numbered now for sure. The cable and satellite companies should be especially concerned with Jeff Bezos and Amazon because Mr. Bezos is no fool and Amazon has given every indication that they intend to become a very serious competitor in this space. They aren't there yet, but the cable and satellite companies ignore Amazon at their peril, especially in the medium to long run.
Part of the job of any CEO is to publicly promote the company and make bold statements not just in support of the company and its products but also against the competition and their products. He's just doing his job.
So companies provide employees with a free benefit, thereby reducing pollution, and relieving traffic congestion, and this means that things are "getting worse"?
It makes sense once you consider the politics of the city and the people who live there. For example, it's obvious to most of us here that in a free society with a market economy the labor of some will be worth more than the labor of others and that over time this will invariably manifest itself in public displays of wealth inequality. However, in San Francisco it offends their delicate socialist sensibilities that something akin to mass transit is being offered privately to a privileged few and in a much finer manner than what is generally available to the public. Indeed, it's all the more galling to them that it's buses and not luxury cars because it invites an unfavorable comparison with the public mass transit system where, despite decades of effort, they have not been able to achieve nearly the same level of quality, reliability or luxury. In short, they're jealous of others' earned success and work themselves into a tizzy at what they view as a bourgeois privilege intruding upon what was formerly, at least in their eyes, a public and egalitarian method of transportation.
Another factor in all of this is the general lack of interest in the open source community when it comes to nuts and bolts accounting software. There are several reasons for this in my estimation. First, many developers work on this kind of software in their day jobs and the prospect of spending what little hobby time remains on bean counting software just isn't very exciting. Second, the small and medium sized business market for this type of software is already well served with off the shelf retail products and the types of organizations that aren't, including government and large businesses, have too much bureaucratic baggage and bullshit to make the project enjoyable. Finally, the types of people that one encounters in the open source movement aren't typically money people. If they were, then they would have gone to work for Wall Street instead.
It's funny how we claim in western culture that we should be free to do as we please as long as it's not hurting anyone else, but there are so many that feel the need to jump in and stop others from go on what could be the greatest adventure any of us could ever go on
It's a disease of the mind that we call Liberalism. Common symptoms include an insatiable desire to meddle in the affairs of others and irresistible urges to insert themselves into situations where they're neither invited nor welcome instead of minding their own business. The end result is a dependent and needy adult who cannot make their own way in the world without government assistance and with absolutely no clue about how the economy works or why nobody wants to pay them a "living wage" as a reward for their "enlightened" way of thinking.
The financial crisis of 2007-08 would have occurred even if the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act had never passed. The great houses of finance would have existed anyway, regardless of whether or not they were able to take on insured depositors, and they would have been just as big as they were. In fact, anyone who believes that the likes of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase wouldn't have been able to raise the capital necessary to inflate the derivatives bubble that blew up in 07 or that AIG wouldn't have taken on counter party risk by selling credit default swaps if only Glass-Steagall had been in full effect is either ignorant, naïve or pushing an agenda to people who are.
It was my understanding that polynomial time reducibility among NP complete problems had been proven, although I don't have a reference handy. However, reducibility is not the same thing as solving and just because conversion is theoretically possible doesn't mean that conversion algorithms for every pair of NP complete problems are automatically known and even if they are known, converting from one to another hasn't actually made solving either of them any easier since they both remain NP complete. You've obviously heard of the P = NP problem so you must also know that if even one NP complete problem could be solved with a polynomial time algorithm then all NP complete problems would also be solvable in polynomial time because they could first be converted to the formerly NP complete problem and then solved using the polynomial time algorithm. If such an algorithm could be demonstrated then the proof of P = NP would follow. Of course, no such algorithm has ever been demonstrated by anyone, probably because P almost certainly doesn't equal NP. Unfortunately, proving P != NP, which is almost certainly the case, is much harder because there is no provable limit to the number of problems that might ultimately be in NP so proof by exhaustion is out. That means that any proof of P != NP must rely upon pure math which has thus far proven to be non-trivial, as computer scientists are fond of saying.
Ugh that risotto with grubs did not help either... yuuuuucckkkkk! Bleah! Ugh!
And yet there is at least one group of native people living in the forests of Indonesia, The Koroway, who regularly eat Capricorn beetle grubs taken from rotten Sago tree logs.
Steve was right. The problems in our public schools are not caused by technology or lack thereof and cannot therefore be solved by technology. They are primarily political and economic in nature and must be addressed through reform of both how we organize and how we pay for our schools. Of course, the reforms that would be most effective in improving student outcomes and lowering costs are vehemently opposed by the teachers unions and their allies in the Democratic Party which is a shame because the students who pay the heaviest price for this failure are the very students whom the Democrats and their liberal progressive allies would most like to help, economically disadvantaged children of minority parents attending inner city schools. For example, do you suppose that those few parents in DC that were lucky enough to win vouchers for their children to attend elite private schools, like the one where Obama sends his own children, thanked the President for ending that program and throwing their children back into the worst public school system in the nation, they very one that they had tried so hard to escape, just so that he could appease the public school teachers and their union by doling out political patronage? Parents want vouchers and charter schools because that's what actually works, not more empty promises from the teachers unions and so-called education "activists" linked to the plantation that is the Democratic party.
The United States of America is the shining example of totalitarianism in the world today.
As compared to Russia or Venezuela or Iran or any of the other countries were people are truly oppressed? The left in the United States loves to compare their petty inconveniences to the real suffering that goes on in the rest of the world with wildly hyperbolic language, but in so doing they merely demonstrate their foolishness for all to see. The United States has many problems, but totalitarianism isn't one of them.
If young people don't pick up the fight that is literally their loss.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - Ronald Reagan.
The targets alone prove that this was the work of the Chinese because there's no money to be made in attacking either of these groups. The criminals are in it for the money and they wouldn't waste zero days on military groups in the Philippines or some offshoot of the Falun group of religious people. Furthermore, everybody knows that the Chinese government employs hackers, it's now documented public information, so there's no obvious political value in staging a false flag operation to make it look like it was the Chinese because that cat's already out of the bag. The only government on the entire planet that would perceive any value in attacking either of these groups is the Chinese government.